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Topic: strange 8.10 install issues (Read 3470 times)

I think I have finally gotten my array of crazy issues figured out, so I am posting them here so that someone else may benefit from all of the hair I pulled out.

The problem:

Whenever I tried to install 8.10 a2 as per the wiki here:http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LinuxMCE-0810_alpha2I would get an array of different issues. They seemed to be random and plentiful. I did 13 installs (yes I am persistent). Every one of which was plagued by different issues such as: the set up wizard was displaying the video but none of the controls were visible or was terminating early for no apparent reason, failure to recognize the usbuirt, mythTv refusing to change channels on the STB despite the system recognizing the usbuirt, the orbiterinstall.msi file being corrupted, and the list goes on and on.

Every install would have different issues and I could not figure out the problem. After doing a bunch of surfing and reading I found a walk through of someone else's 8.10 install. Sadly I cannot locate the post now, it was not in the LMCE forum or wiki. But they went through the steps just like in the wiki. At the end he said that he was downloading from the Canadian repositories. I don't live in Canada and had been setting my location to GA, USA.

For my final install I installed the LMCE version of Kubuntu and set the location to Canada. Then I downloaded the installer latest file and ran the scripts. AH-HA! everything works perfectly. Maybe someone else can shed some more light on this subject, or maybe someone will tell me that it is coincidence, but it worked for me. Maybe it will help someone else too.

It seems, quite a few people have experienced problems due to connection issues with the Ubuntu repositories. We used to retry from the installer script. With the advent of apt-cacher, apt-cacher is taking care of downloading packages for us. It seems, apt-cacher has problems with flaky connections/sources. For now, I have disabled apt-cacher in the new-installer in svn. There is no new installer-tarball yet, as we do need to do some more tests with this new version.

For anyone curious, because this was asked in a different post, my install just got done- took approximately 4.5 hours on a 5mb line in the US.

Oddities:1) The AVWizard appeared on the first reboot- on this TV I have always in the past had to press buttons to select the correct output and resolution.

2) Now been about 4.75 hours from first starting and Sarah just appeared. Sound was not working at the AVWizard, but is working now. Only problem is that Sara and the display are huge- can only see about 2/3 of what I should see. Going to reboot and rerun the AVWizard. Odd as that this is the resolution that I ran for my core just 6 hours ago...

2b/3) The resolution kept changing when trying to go through the setup wizard- I selected 640x480 to insure it would fit on my screen and at times the whole screen would be filled, and at other times just about 1/4.

4) My ZWave (micasaverde usb one with the blue flashing light) was detected 1st time ever on the first go!!! and detected my lights. Super sweet.

5) The text color when typing in the SD username and password on this titanium silver?? skin is white (on the gray background).

Well... dont' know where to start. The good news is that my computers that connect through the routers on the internal network are able to connect to the internet after I clicked the "update" button on the network screen in the web admin...

The bad news is that the "ERROR: Cannot connect to the router, rebooting in 5 seconds.." black screen of death from a couple alphas back seems to have reappeared. I've only tried to install (2) orbiters- win orbiter and one on a webdt and this MD. The orbiters seem to work great- the MD is costing me the hair on my head... er floor.

Are you using a single nic? If so try to do a reinstall if you want to try this out:

DO NOT USE DHCP for you internet connection!

I have had the same symptoms as you, havnt done a reinstall yet, looks like something goes wrong when the system is setting up your internet access and does not handle DHCP correctly. My guess is that at some point it did not work properly in the install and hence you are missing some packages or some missing configurations due to these errors ...

Well... dont' know where to start. The good news is that my computers that connect through the routers on the internal network are able to connect to the internet after I clicked the "update" button on the network screen in the web admin...

@huhI've noticed this too after some recent upgrade, machines on the internal network cannot connect to the internet.I've a fixed external IP and the settings are correct, core can see the outside world.I make no changes to the network settings on the network admin page, just press the update and then internal machines can connect.Is this the same issue? what script gets executed in the background when this button is pressed? I might be able to do before and after comparisons.

Emiku- no, no single nic or any other non-standard features/equipment. The Devs have way too much going on with the standard setups to try and diagnose problems caused by problems that I've introduced...

Coley/Emiku- interesting idea- I will try and set the external ip to static. As it is, with DHCP from my cable modem on the external network (yes, external is eth0; yes, internal is eth1) the core is able to browse the internet without an issue. The crazy part was that I had a wireless router downstream of the core serving out 192.168.80.xx addresses and computers connected to this router could not get past the core- I could get the admin pages, but could not hit anything above that. Upon clicking the update button, computers on this router were able to hit the internet.

What I do not understand is the cannot connect to router issue. The MDs are able to connect to the core- they have to otherwise during the PXE boot it would time out. But they do connect and the screen fills up with the startup information. Then, IIRC, after it determines the network speed, the screen goes blank with out that "ERROR: cannot connect....". I think I am going to try 2 things tonight:

1) try a different MD- this one has worked great in 710 and 810, but who knows, maybe something unpredictable happened.2) move MD(s) directly downstream of the core- right now they go through a switch, but I think I will try connecting one directly to the core and seeing if that makes a difference. Maybe my switch went bad.

Something probably completely unrelated, is that I was with 810 having problems with 1 MD connecting at 1000mbs. Half the time the MD would fail to PXE boot- would say a host could not be found or whatever the message is about the cable not being connected, a quarter of the time the boot would die part of the way through and the other quarter of the time the MD seemed to do just fine. I have cat5e/6 through the house and all I did was force 100mbs by using a cat5 cable from the wall outlet to my MD NIC and never had an issue afterwards. Probably just a fluke.

UPDATE: No luck- changed the external address to static from DHCP and no luck- MDs still don't connect.

I've also found that none of my media is being discovered- it was on a DLink 323 (which was not discovered even after 12 hours) and then after moving some of the songs onto an internal harddrive (not the OS drive, but a slave to it still on the core) then another 12 hours and nothing is discovered.

Also, although the zwave usb device was discovered during the setup, the on/off commands in the web admin do not cause the lights to turn on/off.

Just ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade to the latest, will wait a while to see if that helps/changes anything.

I did a fresh install - twice actually- today. I can also confirm, that media is not being discovered so far. I get the partitions mounted, I can access everything with the filemanager , but when I check it in the webadmin->Files&Media->Media Files Synch and go to videos, I cannot navigate there, because in the left pane, the partitions do not appear. I the right pane I can see the entries fpr them, but thats it. even resynchronising doesn't do anything to change it...I cannot get my media--------------update:I can confirm all of the above...I just tried to setup my MD and I also got "Cannot connect to router, reboot in 5 seconds". I remember from my previous troubles, that the dhcp likes to start giving out leases from the bottom of the range, right after the core, so I checked the dhcp-leases in the webadmin...all the leases given out are taken by the core itself...at least four or five. I will try to change the range fo the dhcp, lets see what will happen then.-------------------------------------update 2: changing the dhcp-settings is a no go..the issue remains,as for the media not showing up, I checked with midnight commander...it seems the symlinks created are not valid anymore. For example they are pointing to "/mnt/device/30/public/data/video" but in /mnt contains only "upnp". So the none of the partitions are properly mounted....what can I do about it?

What can I say...your kungfu is strong... :-)will I have to execute this script everytime I need to restart the core?------------okay, I do have one more question....I did get carried away a bit with the resynchronizing business...now I gotall the videos from the wizard showing up in my media...is there a way to get rid of that again, without deleting the data?

It has been my experience no- that adding stuff (got my zwave to work but just unplugging and replugging it in), rebooting, shutting off, I have NOT tried adding internal hardware (harddrives, nics, etc), does not cause the cannot to connect error.

The only time I saw that was when I was adding a new MD- not even a new orbiter did it. But then, it has only been (1) of the (3) that I have added that gave me that error. And it was the first one after getting the core up. I have run that command a total of 2 (complete) times. I killed the process the first time cause it thought it would run the trying to connect loop indefinitely.

As for the wizard videos- never seen that before that they showed up under movies. Maybe a media files sync from the web admin pages?

like I said..I got a bit carried away...I went up to the home directory and did a resynchronize there. Thats when those files showed up.As for the rest, its all working now...I'm setting up the md right now. Also my partitions are showing up again and I can access all my files now. So far I didn't reboot the core, so I don't know if I will have to start that script again. I hope the next update can get a fix on it.